Texas Beyond History

Created in Clay

Reviving a Lost Tradition

Engraved pottery by Jereldine Redcorn.

Dr. Jim Bruseth shows members of the Caddo
Culture Club pottery sherds last touched by their ancestors
hundreds of years earlier. Texas Archeological Society, 1991
Annual Field School. Photo by Bill Martin.

Click images to enlarge

Taysha, engraved tripod bottle made by
Jereldine Redcorn in 1998. The tripod feet are hollow and
contain small clay balls that rattle when the bottle is shaken.
Height 9.5 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

Hasinai, engraved bottle made by Jereldine
Redcorn in 1998. Height 7 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

Lowell "Wimpy" Edmonds, shown here at
a 1993 dance, was known as the "Keeper of Caddo Songs."
Redcorn credits him with inspiring "young people and older
people like myself in learning the songs and dances." Her
pottery-making is an outgrowth of this renewed interest in Caddo
culture.

It began one warm day in the second week of June,
1991, when members of the Caddo Culture Club walked into the Museum
of the Red River in Idabelle, Oklahoma. The club had formed several
years earlier under the leadership of Lowell "Wimpy" Edmonds
to bring together tribal members interested in preserving traditional
knowledge, the Caddo language, and traditional forms of expression
such as dance. They were visiting the area at the invitation of
the Texas Archeological Society during the Society's annual field
school, held that year at the Roitsch site, an ancient Caddo settlement
on the Texas side of the river. The archeological group had asked
the Caddos to come see what they were doing and perform traditional
Caddo dances. This, in itself, was a first and an important step
toward a closer and more respectful relationship between Texas archeologists
and the Caddo Nation. But for the present story the real eye-opener
came when the Caddos visited the museum.

Entering the museum, the tribal members were stunned
to see hundreds of often spectacular pottery vessels made by their
ancestors on display and in storage. Vessel after vessel, bowls,
bottles, jars, fancy fine wares, and everyday cooking pots. Tribal
elder Randlett Edmonds, who was in his 70s, turned to his friends
and said "I haven't seen this before, I didn't know,"
recalls Jereldine Redcorn.

"We all felt that way and there were Caddo
women with us who were in their 80s. Way in the back of our minds
some of us must have had an idea, but most of us really didn't
understand what we had lost until that moment. That day we were
so excited that we decided as a group, as a tribe, we would learn
how to do it and make Caddo pottery once again."

Reviving the lost tradition of making Caddo pottery
proved anything but easy. Of those who vowed to learn that day,
only one was young enough and determined enough to be able to make
it happen. Somehow the ancient pots in that museum spoke to Jereldine
Redcorn. Not in so many words, but in ideas, in feelings, in shapes
and forms forgotten, and in those marvelous designs created in clay
so long ago. Caddo pottery gave her an instant connection to an
ancestral past she had never really understood before. But unlike
earlier Caddo potters, Jereldine had no knowledgeable elders to
turn to for guidance, no tight-knit group of female potters to work
with and learn with. So she set out on her own path, to find her
peoples' way back to the lost tradition.

Her brother had made simple coiled pots, so he spent
a day with Jereldine showing her what he knew. She read a few books,
but mainly she just started making pots. Her first pots were "really
ugly" she says today with a laugh, but she persisted. Her main
inspiration came from her ancestors through the Caddo pottery they
had made long ago. She was astounded to learn how many Caddo pots
had been dug up from the graves of her ancestors. She visited more
museums and talked with archeologists. They sent her books and articles.
From TARL came a rare copy of the 1962 Handbook of Texas Archeology,
with page after page of black and white photographs of Caddo pots.
"Please donate it to the tribe when you don't need it anymore,"
they told her. "That was 12 years ago and I'm still using it
today" says Redcorn, "so I guess I'll have to put it in
my will to give it to the tribe."

Slowly, awkwardly, and painfully at times, she learned
to make Caddo pottery. Some of the steps, like burnishing and engraving,
were "incredibly hard to learn" and took her many years
to master. But she kept trying and kept getting better. And pottery-making
skills weren't all she had to master.

"I went through stages. At first I was overwhelmed
and excited, a new world to our past had opened up. Later I became
angry, really angry at losing it [the pottery tradition] and at
what had happened to our people: the [tribe's] removals [from
Louisiana and Texas], boarding schools [which generations of Caddo
children were forced to attend to break the hold of Caddo culture],
the [U.S.] government and how they treated us. But as I made pottery,
I worked out a lot of conflict. I realized that we couldn't go
back, only forward. By reviving part of the tradition, you find
something that helps you look towards the future. [Realizing this]
gave me more excitement and joy. [And, I think,] no matter what
else, Caddo people are proud of me for doing this. This one thing."

Born of a Caddo father and a Potawatomi mother, Jeraldine
Redcorn was raised in Colony, Oklahoma, on her grandmother Francis
Elliot's Caddo land allotment. "We were 15 miles from most
of the other Caddos, which back then [1940s and 1950s] was a long
way. We lived closer to some of the Cheyenne and Arapaho people."
Apart from what she learned attending occasional dances, she did
not know much about her Caddo heritage early in life. The quest
for higher education took her to Plainview, Texas, where she earned
a BS from Wayland University and then to State College, Pennsylvania,
for her MA from Penn State. She married, raised a family, taught
school, worked in an early Oklahoma Indian Headstart program, served
on the Caddo Tribal Council, and was the founding director of Oklahoma's
annual Red Earth Festival. She taught high school geometry in Oklahoma City for many years before her recent retirement and today lives with husband Charles Redcorn (Osage)
in nearby Norman.

Having learned how to make Caddo pottery, one of Jereldine's
most important goals is to pass on the hard-won knowledge she has
gained to other Caddo women, especially younger women who could
keep the revival going. She has given lessons to several dozen women,
including her daughter, but so far she hasn't found an apprentice
who has both the determination and the love of pottery. "It's
a difficult path, she laments, "it takes a lot of time and
hard work." "But," she says wistfully, "it would
be so much fun to have a group of women working with me. I get so
excited now and it's just me. My fervent hope is to keep the tradition
going."

So she keeps moving forward, making pottery when she
can and working to perfect her craft. Sometimes life intervenes
and she must go months without making pottery. "I feel like
something is missing, like a part of me isn't there." As soon
as her hand are wet with clay again, her world feels right and the
passion comes right back.

Redcorn's husband, Charles, is her "wood expert"
who fashions pottery tools for her, gathers the right kind of fuel
wood, and helps her on firing day. He more than anyone has shared
her journey. She also credits archeologists for encouraging her
and helping her learn her craft. Don Wyckoff from the Sam Noble
Museum at the University of Oklahoma and Lois Albert from the Oklahoma
Archeological Society were among the first to see her early pottery.
"I was just starting and I wasn't any good, but they were kind
and gave me hope that I could do this." She also visited the
museum where they gave her special access to the Caddo pottery collections
so she could study closely the tell-tale marks of the ancient maker's
pots. She also visited Jim Corbin at Stephen F. Austin University
in Nacogdoches, Texas. Corbin, a potter himself, freely shared what
he had learned about Caddo pottery with Redcorn. "He sent me
home with sacks of Caddo clay and new ideas."

Archeologists were also the first people who wanted
to buy her pottery. "I would go to the Caddo Conference every
year and bring what I had made." At first she didn't know anybody.
She and Charles attended a few talks and wondered how the archeologists
"could sit there and listen to some of that stuff" (the
normal reaction of any sane, non-archeologist and that of many archeologists
as well to mind-numbing details delivered in monotone.) Thankfully,
some of the talks she heard were more inspiring and she realized
some of the archeologists were as passionate about Caddo pottery
as she was. Soon she made friends and found that Caddo archeologists
(archeologists who study Caddo sites) were keenly interested in
what she was doing. They not only liked her pottery, but they bought
it. They also showed her more pictures, gave her more books, and
started asking her to replicate their favorite archeological pieces.
The Redcorn pots photographed for the modern Caddo pottery gallery
were all bought by Austin-based archeologists at Caddo Conferences.

Redcorn did not, of course, start making Caddo pottery
to make money. She really had no idea anyone would think enough
of her pottery to buy it. "Up here on the Plains," she
says, "there really isn't a pottery culture today. There are
some good Cherokee potters, but it's not like the Southwest."
Vibrant local pottery culture or not, today Redcorn's pottery commands
hundreds of dollars and is on display in museums and in the homes
of archeologists and art collectors. Having retired in 2004 from her longtime job as a high
school geometry teacher, she now is able to fully concentrate on her craft.

In the Making Caddo
Pottery section you can read more about what Jereldine Redcorn
has learned while following her vision to revive the lost Caddo
pottery tradition. And visit the Pottery
Gallery to see more of her pottery. For contact information,
see Credits and Sources.

These two Redcorn bottles illustrate hard
and easy. Replicating the Haley Engraved bottle on the left
was a time-consuming challenge. The replica of the red-slipped
Maxey Red Noded bottle on the right was much easier to make.
Courtesy Tim Perttula, photo by Sharon Mitchell.

Jereldine Redcorn making a coil to begin
adding these to the clay disk she has already made to form
the walls of a pot. Photo by Rhonda Fair.

Here the first coil has been added and
Redcorn begins welding it to the disk-bottom. Photo by Rhonda
Fair.

After several coils have been added, Redcorn
begins to thin walls of the half-formed pot using a wooden
scraper. Later, she will use a wooden paddle and gourd anvil
to further compact the clay and thin the vessel walls. Photo
by Rhonda Fair.

Redcorn begins burnishing a bottle made
several days earlier that she has allowed to dry to a leather-hard
state. She uses a smooth pebble and a very thin clay wash
during this step. The burnishing compacts and aligns the microscopic
flat clay particles, forming a smooth surface. After about
an hour and a half of concentrated effort, the surface of
this bottle will have a nice lustrous polish. Photo by Rhonda
Fair.

The artist studies a bowl she has partially
engraved and mentally plans how the two ends of the as-yet-uncompleted
design will meet to form a flowing whole. She uses a pencil
to trace a few guide lines to outline the main design elements.
When she was learning the engraving process, she would spend
hours trying to measure and plan each design to perfection.
Now, she says, the designs "are mine" and she "goes
with the flow," meaning that she adapts the design to
fit each pot as she goes with the confidence born of practice.
Photo by Rhonda Fair.